Invetech 3D bio-printer is ready for production, promises ’tissue on demand’
31st December 2009
If it works.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Invetech 3D bio-printer is ready for production, promises ’tissue on demand’
31st December 2009
If it works.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Invetech 3D bio-printer is ready for production, promises ’tissue on demand’
31st December 2009
A Tim Allen special. Arh, Arh, Arh.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Stanley Torch Watch lights your path, highlights your odd aesthetic sensibilities
31st December 2009
A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that if he were running for re-election today, Mr. Nelson would lose to Nebraska’s GOP Governor David Heineman by a stunning 61% to 30%. Only three years ago, Mr. Nelson won his current term with a solid 64% of the vote.
Some good news, for a change.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Ben Nelson’s Purgatory
31st December 2009
A decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two grandees of American journalism, warned of a crisis: The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal had revealed a news media publishing at “warp speed,” discarding probity for prurience and embracing a non-stop news cycle of aggression, allegation and assertion where once facts were checked and sources confirmed before ministering scandal to the public. Much like a beleaguered Scotty on a hurtling Starship Enterprise, Kovach and Rosenstiel warned that democracy “cannot take it.”
Well, they need to get rid of the political filters first.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Time For A Slow-Word Movement
31st December 2009
A US court has turned back an appeal of a 2008 ruling that declared that if you blow out your ears by listening to your iPod too loudly, it’s your own damn fault.
Common sense breaks out in the American legal system! Who saw that coming?
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Court: iPod hearing loss your fault, not Apple’s
31st December 2009
Too bad it didn’t happen to Tolkien before he died.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on LoTR maker Jackson knighted in NZ
30th December 2009
Heather had two mommies, and they’re both bitches.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Mother v Mother: Former Lesbian Couple Battles Over Child
30th December 2009
A devout Rockland County couple is suing the New York Archdiocese for barring their daughter from attending a Catholic preschool because she hasn’t been fully vaccinated.
The couple, who filed the suit anonymously, charges they’re being subjected to religious discrimination and are seeking a court order allowing their 4-year-old to attend the St. Margaret School in Pearl River after the archdiocese turned down their request for a religious exemption.
I was under the impression that ‘religious discrimination’ was sort of the whole point behind having Catholic schools. Shows how much I know.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Vaccine ‘holy war’
30th December 2009
The school has to pay, of course.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on $150,000 Settlement for Black Public School Students Harassed by Other Black Students for “Acting White”
30th December 2009
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How would the American legal system punish conjoined twins if one committed a murder while the other was completely innocent?
30th December 2009
Christopher Hitchens is always worth reading.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why are we so bad at detecting the guilty and so good at collective punishment of the innocent?
29th December 2009
Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Abortions delay Messiah’s arrival, Israel’s chief rabbis say
29th December 2009
Urban Democrats are flooding rural districts to steal elections.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Invasion of the Election Snatchers
29th December 2009
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The unlikely origin of fish and chips
29th December 2009
Ilir Kumbaro, a former east European spy master, is alleged to have kidnapped and tortured three men in his Albanian homeland. But after falling out with officials there, he fled to Britain in 1996.
He allegedly used the alias Shaqa Shatri to claim asylum and moved to a council estate in Fulham, London.
He is understood to be claiming thousands of pounds in jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefits, having never worked during his 13-year life in Britain.
And why not? His side won, after all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Former East European spy master claiming benefits in Britain
29th December 2009
Bryan Caplan takes a look.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Were American Econ Textbooks So Pro-Soviet?
29th December 2009
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Recipe: How to Lose To Terrorists
29th December 2009
It’s as I always say: Rodents get all the good stuff.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Antibody finds, wipes out prostate cancer: study
28th December 2009
The blubbery sea lions at Pier 39, one of San Francisco’s smelliest and most famous tourist attractions, are gone. During the last week of November, they left the wooden docks on which they’ve spent the last 20 years and no one knows if they’ll be coming back.
Perhaps they don’t want to get fined for not buying health insurance.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
28th December 2009
Some cruel, mysterious force or deity prevents me from hearing the name of anyone I’m introduced to, admits Michael Deacon.
And I know exactly what he means.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The nightmare of meeting people
28th December 2009
Well, okay for Canada, but the American electoral system already does that very elegantly.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs
28th December 2009
Oh, Lordy. Probably not safe for work.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on All Gone Wrong
28th December 2009
“Exponentials R Us.” That’s the magic of computer science. It’s what differentiates us from all other fields. (To the extent that other fields are experiencing exponentials, it’s because of computer science – for example, the sensor technology and computational power that are driving biotech.) “Exponentials R Us” is the past, the present, and the future of computer science. If you think you can have greater impact doing something else, you’ve got your head wedged.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Exponentials R Us: Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come
28th December 2009
But, again, since this is the Kindle we’re talking about, shouldn’t Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented? When someone buys a physical book from Amazon, they then own that book and can do pretty much what they want with it, including reselling it or giving it away. When they “purchase” an ebook from Amazon, that’s not the case at all. They’re quite limited in what they can do with it. They can’t resell it. They can’t share it with a friend (unless they give up their entire Kindle and all the books on it). And, of course, Amazon can make the ebook disappear at will — though, it insists it will never do this again. Even though it can. So, congrats to Amazon, for renting more books on a day when such rentals are to be expected and when physical book sales are probably at their very lowest.
Perhaps ‘leased’ would be the most correct term.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
28th December 2009
If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.
If you want to know whether a culture is degenerating, watch for those who cannot distinguish between ‘if’ and ‘whether’. But read the piece anyway.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on It’s not the rats you need to worry about
28th December 2009
First, as I pointed out in this post, many of the TSA’s most intrusive and annoying policies are not used by Israeli airport security, generally considered to be the best in the world; these include forcing people to take off their shoes and confiscating all liquids other than those in special containers. Interestingly, the measures used by the TSA, but not by the Israelis, tend to be highly visible and intrusive to the average traveler. That leads me to suspect that the TSA has adopted them for “security theater” reasons, so as to make it seem that they are making a great effort to combat terrorism, and make people feel more secure. If the public sees the TSA making a major visible effort, fear will perhaps decrease and the agency is less likely to be blamed for any security failures that may occur in the future. Thus, the agency engages in “political theater” measures despite the inevitable grumbling by passengers. The Israeli public, by contrast, may demand less in the way of security theater than American voters, because of the nation’s vastly greater experience in dealing with terrorist attacks.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
28th December 2009
Everything good is bad for you.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Great Fish Oil Experiment
27th December 2009
Mencius Moldbug is at it again.
Teh Internets are a big place, though, surely with room for a good liberal racist. Naturally, LB’s goal is to convince liberals to be racist rather than racists to be liberal, and he is not always good about replying when served. But he can take off the gloves and hit a little. I charge him with contempt for history; he suggests that I should be burned as a witch. We could both be right.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Shooting the alligator and other conversations
27th December 2009
Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, identified what he called the “three laws of prediction,” reflecting an optimistic view of ingenuity: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong; 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible; and 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
He has some good ones.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Technology Predictions Are Mostly Bunk
27th December 2009
David Friedman points out that markets will show up even when they aren’t invited, that you can learn a lot about life from role-playing games even when you’re not trying to, and that much of what people ‘know’ about economics is nonsense based on silly word games.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Arbitrage, Comparative Advantage, and World of Warcraft
27th December 2009
Islam has been at war with the Western world for fourteen centuries — since its inception. Muslims all over the world still consider themselves to be at war with non-Muslims; this is why Islam refers to us as Dar al-Harb, the “House of War”.
The West, however, has forgotten that this war exists. We continue to labor under the illusion that Islam is an ordinary religion, like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Unfortunately, Islam is above all a totalitarian political ideology, sugar-coated with the trappings of a primitive desert religion to help veil its true nature. The publicly stated goal of Islamic theology and political ideology is to impose the rule of Islam over the entire world, and make it part of Dar al-Islam, the “House of Submission”.
Widely accepted Islamic theology based in Koranic doctrine explicitly requires that Islam be spread by any and all means necessary, including by violence and mass slaughter, in a process known as jihad, or holy war.
The fact that many Muslims do not support or engage in violent jihad is not germane. If only one percent of Muslim believers take the Islamic mandate of jihad seriously, it means there are over fifteen million people scattered among the world’s Muslims who want to destroy us, and we have no means of determining in advance which ones they are.
Therefore, those who oppose Islamic totalitarian ideology and the expansion of Islam into the West have formed themselves into a coalition known as the Counterjihad.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Counterjihad: Resisting Islamization and Reviving the West
27th December 2009
Read it.
An analysis of the Ft Hood incident.
Days after the shooting, at a point where the motives for the massacre were obvious to most ordinary Americans, commentators, reporters, psychologists, and Army spokesmen were still “searching for a motive.” Hot on the trail of the real motive? For many Americans the point had been reached where such assurances carried only slightly more credibility than O.J. Simpson’s promise to search for his wife’s killer. Out of respect for Islam, society’s spokespersons had managed to cast themselves in the role of the boy who cried wolf–except that, in this case, it might be more accurate to picture a boy who cries “sheep” every time a wolf appears.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Dhimmi Code
27th December 2009
You are dealing with people who can be targeted, and it is not necessary, under the rules in effect, to make a decision about whether the person could be detained. You can shoot first. There is no affirmative duty to ask first if they want to surrender. In that case, the decision is not a serial one of decide whether you have an obligation to try and detain; and if it seems too dangerous then to strike to kill. You are legally permitted to strike to kill, without warning and without obligation to offer surrender. If that’s the case, and if the personal legal risks to you or your career, now or down the road, are as they are now, and disfavor interrogation or detention, then the incentive runs toward a targeted killing.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Naked Self Promotion about Targeted Killing
27th December 2009
Very cool.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Rambler Socket tucks a recoiling extension cable, pinch of genius within your AC outlet
27th December 2009
Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Britain’s biggest bullock weighs 3,682lbs
27th December 2009
To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news:
Bad news: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of the dollar.
Good news: Windows 7 sucked less than Vista.
Bad news: The downward spiral of the newspaper industry continued, resulting in the firings of thousands of experienced reporters and an apparently permanent deterioration in the quality of American journalism.
Good news: A lot more people were tweeting.
Bad news: Ominous problems loomed abroad as — among other difficulties — the Afghanistan war went sour, and Iran threatened to plunge the Middle East and beyond into nuclear war.
Good news: They finally got Roman Polanski.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Lowlights of a Downer Year: Dave Barry on the money, madness and misery of 2009
27th December 2009
He ought to come to the U.S., where such a video would be a qualification for Governor or Senator, if not President.
If he were caught on video with three boys, however, he could only be a Congressman from Massachusetts. Sorry.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Indian politician resigns over video showing him in bed with three women
27th December 2009
Read it. Points to note:
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Arsonists attack ‘new Sangatte’ centre in Calais
27th December 2009
Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.”
Once again we find our noses rubbed in the fact that intelligence and wisdom do not correlate.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Engineering Jihad
27th December 2009
And why not? The Useful Idiots of the West allow them to get away with it.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Shameless Islamist Doublespeak Rages On
27th December 2009
The greatest strength of America is that people want to live there.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on A Ponzi scheme that works
27th December 2009
Early reports about the failed Christmas bombing of NW 253 raise questions that need answers. Because, frankly, if the reports are true, al Qaeda never should have gotten this close to a successful attack.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Al Qaeda Failed. What About Us? Ten Questions.
27th December 2009
Whether such constant exposure to corporate socialism is a symptom or a cause of why California is a social and financial basket case is an exercise left to the reader.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on With High-End Meal Perks, Facebook Keeps Up Valley Tradition
27th December 2009
Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem
for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also
function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture
the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need
a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion,
and road conditions in real-time.
Soon to be an entry in the Stuff White People Like web site, I suspect.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on The Copenhagen Wheel
26th December 2009
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on “Don’t Say We’re Violent, Or We’ll Kill You”
26th December 2009
Sign me up.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on 10 obsolete technologies to kill in 2010
26th December 2009
Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.
Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Earth-Friendly Elements, Mined Destructively
26th December 2009
Here’s a story to round off the year: a murderous New York gangster tripped over his own baggy trousers last week and fell to his death. Hector Quinones, 44, was in the middle of an apparently drugs-related killing spree when his low-slung trousers fell down and tripped him up. One of his would-be victims fled on to the fire escape of her apartment block; Quinones yanked up his trousers and struggled after her, but no sooner had he reached the fire escape than they fell down again, and he toppled overboard.
Let that be a lesson to us all.
I don’t think that ever happened to a zoot suit….
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
26th December 2009
So when they tell you this is going to save money, you’ll know it for a barefaced lie.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Let’s look at some of our recent cost overruns in government-driven medical spending.